BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) – Vermont’s first death penalty trial in nearly a half century is offering a chilling look at how a staggeringly dysfunctional family can allegedly turn an eager-to-please little boy into a vicious, violent teenager.

No positive memories

A parade of witnesses, including social workers, police officers, bartenders and family members, has portrayed Donald and Debra Fell as abusive, neglectful parents who were far more dedicated to drinking than to taking care of their two children, little Donald and his younger sister Teri. Several witnesses, each of whom had multiple encounters with the elder Fell, said they never once saw the man sober.

“They (the Fells) were constantly intoxicated and abusive toward each other, always fighting and arguing,” testified Susan Benczkowski, the elder Fell’s 40-year-old daughter by a previous marriage.

Teri Fell, 22, told how her parents would encourage her and her older brother to drink the foam from their beers when they were little more than toddlers and how they soon began sneaking drinks from the keg their father kept in the basement of their Wilkes-Barre, Pa., home. She said her brother was a steady drinker by age 8.

“Donnie was always down there drinking it. He liked the taste of beer,” she said Friday while testifying as the defense began presenting its case in the penalty phase of 25-year-old Donald P. Fell’s trial for kidnapping and killing Tressa King, 53, of Clarendon in November 2000.

Teri Fell said she has virtually no positive memories of her father, who left the family when she was in the second grade. “He was always yelling at me and hitting me,” she said of her dad, a Florida resident who hasn’t seen his children in years.

Life or death

Fell was found guilty late last month in U.S. District Court in Burlington of federal carjacking and kidnapping charges, with death resulting. He will receive either a life sentence without parole or a death sentence if the seven man-five woman jury finds his crime was premeditated and carried out in an especially cruel manner.

The charges stemmed from the November, 27, 2000, murder of King.

Fell told authorities he and his buddy approached King in a Rutland supermarket parking lot and forced her to go with them to Dover Plains, N.Y., where they took her down a lonely road, beat her to death and drove away in her car.

Government prosecutors depict the defendant as a scheming, pitiless killer. They say he and his boyhood friend, the late Robert Lee, were fleeing Rutland when they kidnapped King because they had just fatally stabbed Debra Fell and her friend Charles Conway in Debra Fell’s Rutland apartment.

The prosecution laid out how Donald Fell ignored the pleas of his dying mother, who abandoned him when he was 13, as Lee stabbed her to death and how Fell later kicked out King’s teeth with his steel-toed combat boots as she prayed and begged for her life.

“He has earned the ultimate punishment,” said prosecutor William Darrow.

Defense attorneys are trying to show how Fell’s horrible childhood put him on a path that led to the Burlington courtroom. They said he and Lee, who later hanged himself in prison, were high on crack cocaine and alcohol when they killed Debra Fell and her friend and that Fell is remorseful.

Federal public defender Alexander Bunin told the jury Fell is somebody worth saving, referring to the statement of a kindergarten teacher who remembered Fell as a little boy who desperately wanted to please and did well in a structured environment.

A scared little boy’

On Friday, a Pennsylvania policeman who had been called to the Fell family’s home on several occasions remembered the young Donald Fell as “a scared little boy.”

Teri Fell described how she and her brother had spent a lonely Christmas Eve wrapping their own presents when their mother failed to come home from the bar until the next morning, when they found her passed out on the couch.

She also said her brother had stood up to their father on several occasions, preventing him from beating her. “When they began fighting we would run into the bedroom and hide,” she said. “Donnie would console me. He was my protecter.”

But under cross examination she also recalled how her brother began hitting her and fighting with their mother as he grew older. She said he began to smoke marijuana when he was in the fourth grade and would make her smoke it, too, so she couldn’t tell on him.

She said her brother once stabbed a friend of hers in the leg with a fork and hit her mother’s crippled boyfriend over the head with his crutch.

It was during this time, she said, that her brother, who quit school at age 16, was in constant trouble for truancy and was incarcerated in a school for troubled boys.

As he grew older, she said, her brother became infatuated with Satan. She said he talked about Satan, whom he described as “a kind of beast” and got a tattoo on his left arm of an upside down cross with the numerals 666 inscribed on it.

In August 2000, a few weeks before Fell moved to Vermont, she said, she watched him and Lee beat and kick a boy into a coma at Woodstock, N.Y. She said her brother then urinated on the boy as he lay on the ground convulsing. After that, she said, Fell put his shirt over the boy “because he was wet.”

Fell’s trial is scheduled to resume next week. U.S. District Judge William Sessions III, who is presiding, said he anticipates the jury probably won’t get the case until sometime the following week.